Reef Citation Index™
Hawaii's first proprietary AI-citation visibility tracker. Powered by The Reef Method.
Reef Citation Index™ measures which Hawaii businesses get cited when a real buyer asks an AI assistant for a recommendation — across Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot. Quarterly Volumes. Open methodology. Published under Creative Commons.
▸ LATEST
Vol. 1
May 2026
Claude baseline · 50 queries · 5 verticals
▸ NEXT
Vol. 2
August 2026
Multi-engine expansion · 5 engines
▸ INSTRUMENT_05 · REEF_LAB · 2026-Q2 BASELINE
Hawaii-specific citation telemetry — proprietary capture, open methodology.
Five engines. Five verticals. One Hawaii-specific instrument.
Reef Citation Index™ is the productized methodology behind every Hawaii AI-search project we publish. It captures the citation behavior of the five AI assistants Hawaii buyers actually use — and tracks which of the state's businesses they recommend, by category.
▸ ENGINES_TRACKED
Claude
Anthropic · Vol. 1 baseline
ChatGPT
OpenAI · Vol. 2+
Perplexity
Vol. 2+
Gemini
Google · Vol. 2+
Copilot
Microsoft · Vol. 2+
▸ VERTICALS_COVERED
VERT_01
Hospitality
Hotels, resorts, vacation rentals
VERT_02
Real Estate
Brokerages, agents, leasehold
VERT_03
Healthcare
Practices, clinics, specialty
VERT_04
Weddings
Venues, planners, vendors
VERT_05
Home Services
Trades, contractors, repair
▸ MEASUREMENT_PIPELINE
Query Universe
A standardized set of recommendation prompts representative of how Hawaii buyers actually ask AI assistants for help.
Engine Response Capture
Live runs against each AI assistant; full text responses captured and archived for reproducibility.
Entity Validation
Cross-reference cited businesses against verified registries — DCCA, TripAdvisor, Honolulu REALTORS, licensing boards.
Citation Counting
Tally citations per business per query per engine; build per-vertical leaderboards and category winners.
Quarterly Volumes. Dated snapshots. Compounding signal.
Reef Citation Index™ ships on a published quarterly cadence. Every Volume is a dated dataset — methodology reproducible, license open, byline attributed. The cadence is the moat: mainland agencies don't run quarterly Hawaii datasets and never will.
PUBLICATION_ARCHIVE VOL_01 → VOL_04 PUBLISHED
Vol. 1
May 2026
Anthropic Claude single-engine baseline. 50 queries across 5 verticals. Open methodology framework launch.
UPCOMING
Vol. 2
August 2026
Multi-engine expansion — Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot. Hospitality vertical deep-dive.
SCHEDULED
Vol. 3
November 2026
Healthcare and home-services deep-dive. Quarter-over-quarter delta analysis vs Vol. 2.
SCHEDULED
Vol. 4
February 2027
One-year retrospective. Four-quarter trend analysis. Vol. 2.0 methodology revision.
Three places Reef Citation Index™ already runs.
The tracker is the engine behind the public Index, the research case study, and the Reef Method Citations layer. Every Hawaii AI-search artifact we publish runs on this measurement system.
▸ THE_DATA
Hawaii AI Search Visibility Index
The public, CC BY 4.0 dataset and open methodology framework. Volume 1 published; subsequent Volumes follow the quarterly cadence above.
Read Vol. 1 →▸ THE_PROOF
Hawaii AI Citation Analysis
Case Study #003. Reframes Vol. 1 data into the hospitality vertical deep-dive — winners by category, citation patterns, what separates the cited from the invisible.
See the analysis →▸ THE_METHOD
Reef Method · Citations Layer
Layer 3 of The Reef Method — the GEO + AEO visibility layer. Reef Citation Index™ is the measurement instrument that quantifies it.
Read the layer →Open methodology. Reproducible measurement.
Reef Citation Index™ is built on a published, CC BY 4.0-licensed methodology — not a black-box agency tool. The full query universe, engine-response protocol, entity-validation registry, and citation-counting rubric live in the open framework alongside every Volume.
Why open? Because the value isn't the methodology itself — it's the recurring application of it to Hawaii's businesses, by people who know Hawaii's businesses. Mainland agencies can read the framework. They can't run it for Hawaii on a quarterly cadence.
Every claim, leaderboard, and pattern published under Reef Citation Index™ is independently reproducible from the framework. The dataset is timestamped, the engine versions are named, the prompts are listed in full.
▸ FIELD_STUDY · ENTITY_VALIDATION
Citations cross-referenced against DCCA, TripAdvisor, Honolulu REALTORS, DOH licensure.
Named bylines. Open license.
Reef Citation Index™ is a published research instrument with attributed authorship and a permissive reuse license. No anonymous research, no agency-collective bylines, no "data sourced from undisclosed methodology."
▸ LEAD_RESEARCHER
Rodrigo Diniz
Founder & Head of Search Strategy
Author of the open methodology framework. 15+ years in digital marketing; lead architect of The Reef Method.
▸ OPERATIONS_LEAD
Taylor Asao
Director of Client Strategy & Operations
Operational lead on Volume cycles — query collection, response capture protocol, registry cross-validation.
▸ READ_IF:vertical = hawaii